


Loving You Loving Somebody Else

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, It's kind of sad, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 06:39:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7349929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren proposes to Hux's sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loving You Loving Somebody Else

**Author's Note:**

> i was listening to damien rice and fiona apple while writing this so it's got a kind of melancholic feel to it. ha, i just realized i was listening to two people with food surnames.

She wears sheer tights without any rips or runs. She walks with the confidence of someone who views the world as something to conquer, like one day everyone will know her name and she’ll be a deified human. Her smile is uninhibited, her lips stretching too wide as if she’s trying to show off all of her teeth in her happiness. The skin around her eyes crinkles and her nostrils flare when she laughs, always so loudly like every joke is the most amusing one she’s ever heard. When she speaks to someone, she watches them like they’re the only important person in the world and she has a way of steering the conversation back to people too shy to drive it themselves in a way that doesn’t feel intimidating, condescending.

And none of that really matters to him. All that matters is that she leaves his head a mess whenever he sees her. All that matters is the way his skin burns when she hugs him when she arrives to visit her brother and she says, like he should already know, “I’ve missed you.” Like she really has missed him, like he means so much more to her than she does. He hates the way he can’t help but hope that she really did miss him because he misses her whenever the door closes behind her. He hates himself for that. That’s all that matters; that his heart is filled with an insatiable yearning for her and she doesn’t feel the same. Kylo Ren isn’t a romantic person, but he finds himself thinking thoughts tainted with love whenever she’s beside him.

“Are those _flowers_ , Ren?” Hux sneers at the arrangement his roommate has tucked under his arm.

“They…” Kylo pauses and looks down at the flowers with their stems bent and their petals dangling ready to blow away in the slightest wind. His throat clenches and his eyes burn as he grips the bouquet in a fist clenched so tightly his knuckles whiten and his hand shakes. The petals twirl to floor, knocked from their homes by the collision of his fist against the wall, and he stomps on them, grinding his heels into the floor and crushing every fiber of the flowers until there’s nothing but withered stems and crumpled plastic beneath his shiny black boots. “They were for your sister,” he growls, shoving his way around a stunned Hux.

“So, you found out.”

“You could’ve told me instead of letting me do something so stupid, asshole.”

“You could’ve told me you were going to bring flowers to my sister. By the way, she prefers daffodils,” Hux muses, for once dropping his cool façade in his amusement. This is too great, a moment in which he had absolutely nothing to do with his insufferable roommate’s suffering, and yet it’s still as if he’s the cause because his darling sister sits at the very center of Kylo’s problems.

“No, you idiot, I _proposed_ to her,” Kylo roars.

“Oh…” Pity sets in, but Hux doesn’t attempt to comfort Kylo; it would seem wrong, insincere.

Kylo keeps replaying the moment in his mind. Her eyes had been just as warm as usual, his skin had burned the same way it always did when she touched his cheek, but he’d flinched because she spoke and her words felt like a multitude of small knives shoved into his gut at once. His stomach had twisted and he’d felt the weight of her ring against his skin, frozen and tearing him apart like she’d held dry ice to his face instead of her burning palm. And she was the one who cried, not him. He hated her for that, hated himself even more for holding in everything he was feeling because he knew it would only make her cry harder. He couldn’t hold her, couldn’t say anything. All he could do was sit on her couch and pretend he didn’t care about the fact that she wouldn’t even look at the ring he wasted six paychecks on for someone who was already binding herself to someone else.

The world feels so cruel because he knows he’ll receive a nice small envelope inviting him to the day that she should be sharing with him in few weeks, months. He’ll put on a suit for her and she’ll smile at him the way she always does, like she doesn’t know how hard it is to draw in every breath because he feels like he’s inhaling flames and exhaling shards of glass. She’ll be beautiful, too. She’ll be happy and she’ll glow like an angel, swathed in white with eyes so filled with joy they’ll break his choleric heart because he knows he’ll still trail after her like an idiot puppy. She’ll be a dream that doesn’t belong to his sleep. She’ll be his soulmate and someone else’s and she won’t look back as she stitches that other person’s heart to hers, but she’ll still look at him with those same eyes that make him feel so important and he’ll feel so small, like a speck of dust in her palm.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Hux finally says. He clears his throat and waits for the moment to feel right again, for Kylo to lose his mind and destroy the apartment the way he usually does when he can’t handle himself, but the moment doesn’t change. He averts his gaze because he can’t stand the emptiness in Kylo’s usually shining eyes rimmed in red. His eyes are drawn to the sight of his younger sister barging into his apartment.

She looks first at the pile of twisted, dead roses, and her eyes cloud over. Her hair is wet and her stockings are torn, her make up running down her cheeks. Still, her eyes find Kylo and they burn like the flame he wants to hold his hands over on frozen days with only gloves filled with holes to fight the bite of winter’s winds. Suddenly embarrassed, she blushes and murmurs, “You left in such a rush, and I wanted to make sure you got home alright.”

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” Kylo says, unable to raise his eyes to her.

“You were upset. I was worried.”

“Yeah, well I’m fine so go home.” His tone is harsh and he glares at her like his heart isn’t tearing itself apart. He stalks into his bedroom, but doesn’t close the door.

She glances at her brother and bites her bottom lip, hesitant. When he nods his head, she walks slowly, so slowly, toward Kylo’s room. When she reaches the doorway, she stands there a moment too long before shrugging off her jacket and stepping inside. Closing the door, she smiles a forced smile for Kylo that makes him feel like more of a burden than a victim.

“Your fiancé is probably worried about you. You said you had a date planned for tonight,” he mumbles, hanging his head. His hair tumbles over his face, covering the redness of his cheeks, as he sits down on the edge of his bed, every movement of his body awkward and stiff.

“This is more important. You’re more important,” she replies, and he almost believes her.

“If I’m so important to you, why aren’t you engaged to me?”

“Why didn’t you propose a year ago?”

Kylo might have proposed a year ago if he knew she wouldn’t wait, if he knew she’d meet someone else in the space of twelve months spent overseas, away from him in a city whose name is nearly synonymous with love and romance. But he always thought she’d be as constant as Hux, and that she’d cling tightly to one drunken kiss delivered in the midst of an argument neither of them fully remember anymore. No, they only remember that Kylo doesn’t know how to say he loves someone without first claiming to hate them. But he wasn’t ready either way. He was still just a young man immersed in a plan to rule the world with her brother. He was only interested in wreaking havoc while she waited for him to focus on her. “The Knights were taking off. I was broke. You weren’t in love with me. The list goes on,” he says.

“Kylo, you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with someone like me. I like stability, I trust my government, I love my parents, I want a love like the movies, I want someone who isn’t afraid to love me, someone who doesn’t act like love is a disease,” she says. She’s crying again and he wants to hold her, but he can’t bring himself to move. “I don’t want to change you to love you. I want to love you for you, but I know that you’ll never be someone I can spend the rest of my life with. You’re so filled with anger and hatred that you don’t know how to love like the rest of the world. You’re different and that’s fine, but it won’t work with me. _You_ won’t work with me.”

She doesn’t stop him when he kisses her, but kisses him back the same way she did the last time. Her world tilts with his lips on hers and she knows it’s wrong, but she rips at his clothes with the same passion he tugs at hers. Their fingers shake too much and they have to pause several times to breathe, never long enough to think through what they’re doing as they slowly rid themselves of their clothing. Each time they return to each other, he’s a bit more gentle than the last time, but she feels an urgency seep from his lips, from his body when he takes his time carefully pulling her stockings down, when he runs his hands up her thighs and hesitates for a fraction of a second. He doesn’t know how long it takes before they’re both naked on his bed, but it feels like an eternity and all he can see is her and all he can feel is how much he loves her, how much he wants to be the last person to touch her like this. She feels fragile beneath his fingers, solid against his lips as he discovers every inch of her with starved eyes.

She can’t say no, not that she wants to, because each time his lips descend upon her body they send a thrill through her and all she knows is him, his touch. She thinks she should feel a bit more guilt sink into the pit of her stomach when they’re connected with him sinking into her and they’re as close as they’ll ever be and her skin burns where his hands fall. When she hears herself, her gasps and sighs so clear in her ears, she’s never heard something quite like this. He’s silent over her, revealing nothing of how she makes him feel, how wild her body drives him, through sound other than the slightly labored breaths he exhales against her neck when he can’t kiss and nip at her skin. She only knows he’s as desperate as she is by the way his hips snap against her own writhing ones quickly, growing sloppier with each passing second.

Kylo’s lost in her. He feels pieces of a former self attempt to break the surface of him amidst her cries of pleasure as his name rolls off of her tongue like he’s the only thing she needs right now and he hopes she’ll be this way forever. He hopes this changes everything. He hopes this makes up for how terrible he is. He hopes this makes her love him. He knows it won’t because her brother’s always telling him she’ll never settle for someone as volatile as Kylo because she wants a normal life, one unmarred by a terminal anger. She seeks tranquility in the shores of madness with Kylo and she’ll save herself before he can drown her. He can’t change and she’s not going to try to change him. He turns his head to look at her and their eyes meet when her head swivels.

She kisses him like she knows he’ll say something to ruin the moment, to ruin how perfectly he seems to fill her like they were made for each other. Then she’s turning, rolling onto her stomach as he lifts her hips up to meet him and he sinks into her with a feral growl that burns her alive. Her arms ache as he grips her wrists so tightly she cries out and her back arches. All he can see is the way her body stretches to accommodate him, muscles pulling beneath her skin over which sweat rolls. She’s murmuring something about how he feels, how amazing he makes her feel, but her words trail off into nonsensical gibberish as her body seizes and shakes and he feels her tighten and spasm around him, but he can’t stop now because he’s afraid with his own demise impending that this will end and she’ll never smile at him the same way.

When it’s over and he collapses onto her and all she knows is his breath and how it matches hers, she’s terrified of what this means. She sees the flowers by the door when she blinks, the holes in his wall left by his fist when her eyes open. She hears a monster sigh when he exhales and she’s so afraid because she loves him, needs him, but he simply isn’t _right_ for her. She can’t give up her dreams for him and it’s too late to ask him to change now, this oddity of a man or beast that her heart wants nothing more than to hold tightly. Their fingers intertwine and she brings her hand to her lips, ignoring the way her ring catches the light. She wants to cry as she twists it off and pushes it beneath his pillow to be retrieved later because she knows she’ll need it still.

Kylo pulls the ring from beneath his pillow and stares at it as he shifts and falls away from her, his chest heaving.

“It’s still a no, isn’t it?” He doesn’t need an answer.

In the morning, they eat what Hux makes in complete silence. When her brother asks about her ring, Kylo slides it across the table and she stares at it, unsure of what to do with it. Trying to lighten the heavy mood, Hux half-heartedly reprimands them for the noise they made, feigning disgust at the idea of what they were up to. He’s silent, though, when he sees the tears roll down his sister’s face and her fork clatters as it falls onto her plate. He clears his throat when Kylo stands, but doesn’t say anything when the raven haired man leaves the apartment, muttering something about it being too cramped and kicking the mangled bouquet no one bothered to clean the night before.

“If he hurt you…” Hux trails off when she shakes her head, seething.

“We’re both wrong this time,” she says, smiling as if she’s said something that isn’t ripping her insides to shreds.

The next time they meet is on campus with a few weeks between them. She’s glued herself to her fiancé and she smiles at Kylo and looks at him with the same eyes she’s always looked at him with, but there’s something in the set of her shoulders, in the way her fingers loosen around her fiancé’s, that makes her feel gaze feel different. He actually smiles when he sees her, mentions an assignment that a professor they share assigned and all the while he’s looking at her fiancé like he’s silently trying to tell him that he’s slept with the woman he wants to marry. He’s just decided that he won’t say it because he doesn’t want to see her cry in public or get punched in public (though he probably deserves it) when her fiancé jokes that she usually talks about him so much it’s a wonder she’s not engaged to him. And then the words tumble from Kylo’s lips like poison and she recoils.

They don’t sink in for a moment and it takes a second for the man, Victor with dark hair and pale skin and dark eyes, to realize that Kylo isn’t joking because his smile is gone and he’s looking straight into her eyes and she looks like she’s trying not to panic. He doesn’t mean to, but he drops her hand and his eyes slip out of focus because he’s piecing together something that he’s always worried about, this nagging suspicion that he’s been shaking off since she accepted his proposal that came back when she spent the night with her brother after cancelling their plans.

“What do you want me to say?” Victor asks, smiling nervously. He scratches the back of his neck and chuckles wryly. “What do you want me to say to that?” His eyes burn when they meet Kylo’s and he blinks back tears as he tries to cling to his anger over the sinking feeling of betrayal that dries his mouth and forces his heart into his throat. He repeats himself again, clenching his jaw, rage taking the lead. “No one wants to answer me, huh?” he snaps, eyes darting from Kylo to his fiancée. “You’re the only ones with the answers. You’re the ones who fucked each other behind my back and, I don’t want to sound irrational, but you don’t get to play the victims right now when _I’m_ the person who’s being hurt by this!” He falls silent and smiles apologetically at a passing woman who stares, because he’s been raised to keep issues like this to himself, to hide his anger and pain.

“I love you. I’m done with him, I want to be with _you_ ,” she says, pleading with him. She reaches for him and smiles with the most desperate eyes he’s ever seen on a person. But she’s lying because she doesn’t want to try to fix things at this point and doesn’t know why she ever wanted to marry him when the person she wants isn’t Victor.

“She’s fucking lying to you! You’re her fiancé, but she blew you off to have sex with me, telling me that I’m so much more important to her than you are,” Kylo hisses, because he doesn’t want to see her like this. He doesn’t want to hear her say she loves someone else so easily in front of him when he knows it’s a lie. They’re meant to be, even if she won’t accept it, even if it hurts to be together right now because it won’t hurt anymore in a while. They just have to work through this, she just has to admit that she wants to be with him and not some guy who she thinks she wants, but doesn’t love enough to devote herself entirely to.

“I didn’t say that-!”

“Yes, you did, right before you asked why I didn’t propose to you a year ago!”

“I _hate_ you!”

“I hate you, too!”

“God, this is _golden_. I’m leaving,” Victor says. He almost expects her to follow him, but he’s not surprised when she’s not on his heels, begging for him to stay when he finally turns around because he can tell that she loves Kylo more than she ever loved him. He’s known for a while; he was hoping that she wouldn’t realize it.

Kylo lets her shove him as hard as she can the first time, but catches her wrists the second time and pulls her to him the second time, embracing her as she yells at him, calling him every name under the sun.

She can’t breathe as she watches Victor go with her face pressed against Kylo’s chest. Everything hurts in his arms and she hates him so much she wants to throw him off the top of the tallest building in the city. She wants to tear him apart. She wants to step on his dreams. She wants to scream and cry, but her words are muffled and she doesn’t know what she’s saying anyway because she’s so angry and hurt. Does he think she’ll run to him because he made her fiancé run away from her? Is that his plan, to ruin all of her options until she’s left with him as if that’ll ever work? And, yet, a part of her is relieved because now she doesn’t have to lie.

“I hate you,” she whispers, her voice hoarse.

“I love you.” Why do the words have to sound so right on his lips?

“It’s still a no, Kylo.”

They don’t speak to each other for weeks after. Well, she doesn’t speak to him.  He sends her texts, invites her to every function he’s invited to, follows Hux to her apartment despite the disdain the siblings regard him with as if he’s blind to it all. He refuses to admit how much it hurts to have her door slammed in his face, but he always stands in the hallway for a few minutes trying to gather himself when she does it, contemplating whether or not he should knock again because he _knows_ she’ll let him in one day. One day. She’d do more than slam the door if she really hated him, he tells himself. There are days, though, when he arrives and, as he lifts his hand to knock, he hears her crying and he thinks that maybe that day will never come and he gets so angry he wants to break the door down and yell at her for not forgiving him for helping her. That’s what he did, right? _Help_ her. He doesn’t think about it too much because he’s afraid to be wrong.

One day, she opens her door and they talk like old friends about nothing and everything, but they don’t mention Victor and her eyes never quite meet his. She feels inexplicably drawn to him, but it still hurts when he leans in to kiss her because she keeps thinking of how easily he tore her life apart and how he still can’t admit that there’s something terribly wrong with ruining someone’s relationship even though it was already ruined. She doesn’t understand how he can’t understand that he was wrong for doing something she would have gotten around to doing. Every time she feels herself wanting to forgive him entirely because it feels like he’s changing, he does something so terrible she can’t look at him.

Every day she hears about him and her brother doing something a bit more terrible than the last. She’s afraid that one day he’ll show up covered in blood, spewing romantic ideas and she won’t be able to see past the monster. But sometimes they intertwine and in the moments when they’re so close, she thinks she doesn’t mind, but she knows she’s just waiting for someone else to steal her heart because she’s terrified of the things Kylo does with it. They don’t speak of the future; she avoids the conversation like the plague until one day they’re tangled in her sheets and he decides to tell her about his idea of a revolution that will make his grandfather proud. She kisses the words away and tries to forget.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading :) leave a comment if i left some important detail out, please


End file.
